Humans & Super Viruses: Reverse Refinition
I was listening to a podcast about recently discovered “Super Viruses”. They are defined as being much larger and contain more genes than their average viral counterpart. Viruses, to many biologists, don’t constitute as life. They are more like automated lines of code. This is intriguing because the common conception is that they are micro life forms swimming around in us. Truly, they’re not any more aware of us than we are of the WIMP particles floating by us in the trillions. Why these Super Vis are incredible is that they are sized like bacteria–amoebas…that sort of thing. However, they maintain their geometric protein shells and have a star-shaped portal that ejects their replication genes into unlucky cells. These super vis aren’t entirely a recent discovery, they’re more of a recent acknowledgement. We’ve been looking at them for years and just didn’t know what they were. And since the discovery of the first one, larger and more sophisticated ones have been found.
Also, they’re everywhere.
Their origin is unknown. It’s hard to define one with the bizarre nature of their existence. Their best guess is that these Super Vis were actually once living. They were biological life. They had cell walls, mitochondria and were able to create ATP (the substance that gives all living things energy, thus defining lifeforms). But how did they become “dead”? What biologists believe is that long ago, microscopic life went through some odd changes. For example, we’ll start with an amoeba. It performs mitosis, it creates energy, etc. It then is swallowed up by a larger amoeba. Perhaps, the swallower is many times the size of our original. Yet, when inside, it’s not being harvested and actually finds the space livable. This new place is easier to live in than the outside, actually. It begins to adapt. With the comfy new home, the small amoeba begins to shed certain traits it needed on the outside. With each division, it becomes a bit less like it’s ancestor. Eventually, it’s unrecognizable as an amoeba and starts to look a lot like a virus. Later, it starts behaving and looking like one. It burrows itself in living cells and starts replicating to spread its genes.
Why this is interesting is that, though this is happening on a microscopic scale, could it not occur on our “macro” level? What if we were the amoeba that traveled into a comfortable setting and then whittled down into something simple and programmatic? Could we have been gods or higher-dimensional beings that were absorbed by another and then simplified down into human beings? It could explain our contentment for things that are’t beneficial to us like war, the Kardashians and a rampant oil obsession. Higher beings wouldn’t concern themselves with such petty matters. Perhaps, if we could go back to the ancestor, we’d see a sentient being that’s only concerned with the purity of life.
To think the micro scale stops at microbes is irrational. Why should it? From our perspective, yes, they are micro. However, like they can’t see outside of their world, we can’t see outside of ours. We could be the amoeba in the petri dish that’s unaware it’s in a petri dish because it has zero ability to fathom anything outside of creating energy and reproducing.
We could be existing as such a thing right now without the mechanisms to see it. Is there a reversal method? Is there a way to reattach the lost pieces of ourselves to regain a lost sentience?
